Designing hands-on lab exercises in the network security course

Hands-on experiences and practical skills obtained from working on lab assignments are an organic part in the teaching of the Network Security class for students to understand the underneath theoretic parts. This paper has provided the author's experience in designing lab projects in an appropriate level for undergraduate students. This paper presents in details about a security lab setup, lab rules to avoid potential illegal activities for security considerations, the grading policy, and the description of a term project including several successive exercises. From the student responses, the set of lab exercises equipped them with skills on how to identify system vulnerabilities and how to secure a computing system.